Car Park Line Marking: How Many Bays Can You Fit Legally?

If you're planning or resurfacing a car park, one of the first questions is always the same: how many bays can we actually fit? The honest answer is that it depends on your site, your user type, and the standards that apply, but there are some consistent principles that shape every compliant car park layout in NSW.

It Starts With AS 2890.1

Car park line marking requirements in Australia are governed by AS 2890.1, the standard covering off-street parking facility design. It sets out minimum bay dimensions, aisle widths, and circulation requirements so that vehicles can safely enter, park, and exit without creating hazards.

The standard doesn't hand you a magic number of bays. Instead, it defines the space each bay and aisle needs, and your total bay count comes from fitting those dimensions into your available site area.

Bay Dimensions: The Starting Point

Bay sizing depends on how the space will be used. A few general benchmarks that come up consistently across car park design guidance:

• Standard bays are commonly around 2.4m wide under AS 2890.1's User Class 1 (long-term/residential) category, while high-turnover retail bays sit closer to 2.6m to 2.7m under the Class 3 category.
• Separately, NSW's Housing SEPP sets its own minimum of 2.6m by 5.4m for hard-stand car spaces, a planning requirement that applies on top of, not instead of, the AS 2890.1 dimensions.
• Bay length typically sits around 5.4m
• High-turnover retail bays (think shopping centre car parks) are often marked slightly wider than long-term commuter or employee bays, since drivers need more room to manoeuvre in and out quickly

Narrower bays generally mean you can fit more of them, but width isn't the only factor. Angle of parking, aisle width, and how vehicles circulate through the site all affect the final layout.

Aisle Width Matters As Much As Bay Width

This is where a lot of DIY car park planning goes wrong. Aisle width, the space vehicles use to drive between rows of bays, has to be wide enough for a car to enter or exit a bay in a single manoeuvre. Get this wrong and you end up with a car park that looks compliant on paper but is genuinely difficult to use. As a Wollongong line marking provider, it's a detail we always check for before marking a re-do.

Aisle width requirements change depending on parking angle:

• 90-degree (perpendicular) parking needs the widest aisles, since vehicles are reversing straight in and out
• 45 and 60-degree angled parking allows narrower aisles, since vehicles approach and leave at an angle
• One-way vs two-way traffic flow through the aisle also changes the required width

This is why angled parking is often used to squeeze more bays into a tighter site. It's not just about the bay itself, it's about how much aisle space you save.

Don't Forget Accessible Parking

Every car park needs a minimum number of accessible bays, governed by a separate standard, AS 2890.6, which sits alongside the Building Code of Australia's requirements. Accessible bays need to be a specific size, include an adjoining shared area for wheelchair access, and are usually paired with a bollard to protect the shared zone.

The number of accessible bays required scales with your total bay count, so it's worth factoring this in early rather than adding it as an afterthought once the rest of the layout is set.

So How Many Bays Can You Actually Fit?

Here's the honest answer: it depends on your site dimensions, your parking angle, your user type (residential, retail, industrial), and your council's development control plan on top of the Australian Standard itself. Two car parks with identical square metreage can have a meaningfully different bay count depending on these choices.



This is exactly why we don't recommend guessing or eyeballing a layout, and why line marking should be planned properly before a single line goes down. A poorly planned layout either wastes usable space or creates a car park that technically has "enough" bays but is frustrating and unsafe to use day to day.

Plan It Right. Mark It Right.

At KNK Line Marking, we mark to the layout you or your designer provides, and we'll flag anything that looks off before we start, worn markings, unclear bay boundaries, or missing accessible bays. If your existing car park lines are worn or you're planning a re-mark, get in touch for a free on-site quote and we'll talk through what's needed.

For exact bay counts, aisle widths, and layout compliance specific to your site, we recommend working with a certified traffic engineer or your council's DCP requirements. Once your layout is confirmed, our team can handle the line marking itself, done to RTA-approved standards.

Need a car park line marking quote? Get in touch or explore our Car Park Line Marking services to see how we can help.